Skeleton Flower (current touring work)
Skeleton Flower is Degenerate Art Ensemble’s (DAE) performance of live music, visceral movement theater and dance, projected cinematic imagery and storytelling ritual. It is a semi-autobiographical exploration of Haruko Crow Nishimura’s (DAE’s director) struggle with identity, depression, childhood trauma, and the awakening of personal power. The piece deals with these issues with humor and imagination, casting her family as monsters from a Godzilla movie, and traces her personal struggle through three fairy tales which were read to her by her mother growing up (The Wild Swans, The Red Shoes, and The Fitcher’s Bird). The world of Skeleton flower is a multi dimensional patchwork quilt that conjures and consoles her female ancestors through the use of hand felted wools, ten thousand hand painted silk flowers, and knitted sweaters which fill fantastic worlds in the work’s cinematic imagery.
“The piece attains power and awakening by examining the fairytales that my mother read to me when I was young, which ultimately became clues, which through creative work, I was able to confront and navigate my own darkness. It also deals with a violent assault that I experienced as an adult which became the catalyst for healing and the realization of feminine power. Skeleton Flower is a commitment ceremony that confronts the painful energies and tangled karma of my women ancestors. It is an exorcism and personal proclamation to choose my own path consciously for my own life.”
Skeleton Flower was first shown as a work in progress in Plovdiv, Bulgaria as part of American Dance Abroad’s Spotlight USA Festival followed by its world premiere in Seattle in March of 2019. It was performed at the International Festival of Contemporary Dance (FIDCDMX) in Mexico City in August of 2021, was presented at the HC Andersen Festival in Odense, Denmark in 2022 and will be presented at ODC Theater in San Francisco in March of 2024.
SHORT PREVIEW VIDEO
PHOTOGRAPHS
FULL LENGTH VIDEO
BASIC SPECIFICATIONS
Stage
Stage Size: aprox 40’W x 30’D
Lighting
Lighting board with minimum of 48 channels
Sound
Sound board with minimum of 16 channels
Video
1 Full HD Projector, 6k lumens or greater for "Cinema" projection.
2 7K or larger Projectors with appropriate Lenses to fill when combined the full width of the stage area at center stage.
We provide two tracks from which 4 screens (6’ x 13’ each) are suspended which connect to the electrics (we provide all hardware).
Performers
1 musician
1 dancer
Technicians
2 stage hands
1 video designer / operator
1 lighting designer / operator
1 audio engineer
FULL DETAILS, AUDIO, TRACK SPECS, AND LIGHTING PLOT AVAILABLE ON REQUEST
About Degenerate Art Ensemble
Degenerate Art Ensemble makes performances inspired by punk, comics, cinema, protest, nightmares and fairytales driven by the power of live music and their own style visceral movement theater and dance. The group has shown their work throughout the US and Europe known for their large scale dance and theater projects, concerts, site-transforming spectacles and ongoing public experimentation. Recent highlights of the group's work include a major exhibition at the Frye Art Museum in 2011, was commissioned by director Robert Wilson to interpret his work Einstein on the Beach in 2012 and collaborated with the Kronos Quartet in 2013. Also in 2012 Degenerate Art Ensemble was commissioned by the city of Seattle to create a massive site specific work Underbelly in collaboration with Olson Kundig Architects to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Seattle World’s Fair. The group’s 2015 work Predator Songstress premiered at the Yerba Buena Center in San Francisco in 2015. In of 2016 DAE teamed up with Czech rock legends Uz Jsme Doma for an epic orchestral work inspired by the group's music at the Archa Theatre in Prague with the South Bohemian Philharmonic Orchestra. DAE’s newest work Skeleton Flower was first seen as a work in progress at the Spotlight USA Festival in Plovdiv, Bulgaria, had its world premiere in Seattle in 2019, was performed at the International Festival of Contemporary Dance in Mexico City in August of 2021, was performed at the HC Andersen Festival in Odense, Denmark and will be presented in San Francisco in 2024.